


close your eyes, clear your heart

by laughingwithsalads



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-28
Updated: 2017-12-04
Packaged: 2018-08-11 15:39:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 16,179
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7898356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laughingwithsalads/pseuds/laughingwithsalads
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eames gets into JFK five hours late, so jet lagged he’s half a day ahead of himself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Eames gets into JFK five hours late, so jet lagged he’s half a day ahead of himself. There’s a headache building behind his eyes and with every passing moment in the blue-white hell of the Terminal 5 arrivals hall, that ache is verging rapidly towards migraine.

“Thank Christ,” he mutters when his phone vibrates in his hand.

The car is here.

He steps outside, finally, into the muggy heat of early evening. A driver from the car service is waiting, pristine in his uniform. “Mr Eames. May I take your bags?”

“My hero,” Eames says, more gratefully than he’d care to admit, and hurries himself into the car before any of the NYPD’s finest feel the need to start gesticulating.

In the cool of air-conditioning and blackened windows, he fishes the blister pack out of his breast pocket and swallows a few ibuprofen dry.

He’d been in Sydney, is the thing, so that old Maurice could scowl and grumble and impart his latest decree, then to Tunis, to London, to Dublin, to grease the palms of any number of mildly corrupt local officials in an entirely uncorrupt, above board sort of way.

And then on the tarmac at Dublin, seven hours from the end of it all, the company jet decided to be contrary.

He could have waited. Waited for the repairs, or waited until something other could be arranged. But he was impatient to be — well, home as much as anywhere is.

So the headache’s his own fault. The jet lag too.

But none’s the matter. He can numb it all well enough between then and now.

 

#

 

When Midtown traffic and the whims of an unkind god finally deem fit to deliver him to his hotel room, his luggage is waiting for him — along with a number of far more interesting packages. He leaves those discrete bags in the suite’s main bathroom and goes to pour himself a good, stiff drink.

Nothing quite so thrillingly pathetic as mixing booze and pills, after all.

He showers in the ensuite, later, dresses in some chinos and a fresh shirt, unlocks the suite door, then sits himself down on the overstuffed, overchintzed couch. There’s a far more comfortable armchair by one of the many windows, but the monstrosity masquerading as a sofa faces the door.

Old habits, old dogs, all that.

So he sits a while, eyes closed, in the exquisite soundproofing, tries to roll out the tension in his neck, his shoulders, tries to will away the pressure behind his eyes.

Doesn’t work. Doesn’t usually, mind.

Then — a knock at the door. One he’s been waiting for.

“It's open,” he calls.

He should get up, check the peep hole — shouldn’t have left the door unlocked in the first place, but hotel security’s more than decent and the thought of hauling himself upright again was too much ten minutes ago. It’s worse now.

Anyway, he recognises the knock.

_Christ_ , he recognises the knock.

Eyes shut, and he senses the subtle shift in air and pressure as the door comes open, listens to the scrape of the do-not-disturb sign being hung out, the thud of the deadlock turning into place, the quiet pad of feet down the little corridor towards him.

Then —

“Mr Eames.”

“Arthur.”

He opens his eyes. And there Arthur is, in his trim three-piece suit, his shiny balmorals, his slicked back hair — all buttoned up and buckled in.

Eames cannot wait to ruin him entirely. “You know where to go,” he says.

Arthur raises an eyebrow — then does as he’s told.

An interminable time later and, “Black again?”

Eames hears him before he sees him. First the amused voice, then the delicate clack of heels, then as Arthur rounds the corner —

“Disappointed?” Eames asks, because Eames certainly isn’t.

Arthur’s wearing knickers that are nothing more than scraps of silk and lace, a matching garter belt, stockings to the middle of his lovely thighs.

All of them black. Eames can’t help himself. It’s always black — black against Arthur’s skin, stark as his hair.

“Let me see you then.”

Arthur smirks at him, just a little, but obliges with a slow twirl.

“Well, aren’t you a picture?”

The heels are a touch higher than Eames is usually wont to select. The spirit moved him, and he’s glad it did. The extra elevation is doing wonderful things for Arthur’s arse.

“Come here.”

Closer and closer until Eames gets a grip and pulls him in by the garter, keeps pulling until Arthur straddles him on the couch.

Arthur digs his thumbs into Eames’ shoulders when he settles, right into the meat of the muscle, sizing him up again like a week before didn't find them in the same position. Then, apparently satisfied, he leans down and meets Eames’ mouth for a scant few languid kisses.

But five is Eames’ lot before Arthur’s upright again, the pleasant weight of him spread across Eames’ lap. He’s subjected to a considering look from on high. Then —

“Bed,” Arthur says.

“But I’m more than comfortable here.”

“Bed,” Arthur says again, and he doesn’t give Eames any choice, extracting himself from Eames’ lap and sauntering off to the bedroom, the efficient motion of his hips, the tidy little heft of his arse the only incentives Eames needs.

He hauls himself upright and follows.

In the bedroom he stands quiescent while he’s parted from his clothes and pushed back to lie amid a truly ridiculous number of pillows.

Arthur straddles him again, lets him look his fill. Eames does, brings his hands up, lets them rest at Arthur’s waist just above the line of the garter belt.

“Lovely,” he murmurs. “So very lovely.”

“What,” Arthur says, reaching down to circle his wrists. “The lingerie or me?”

“Both, my darling.”

Arthur rewards that with a lingering kiss, just the hint of tongue, teasing the way he knows Eames loves. Then he pushes himself away, intent on more southerly spoils, but when he shifts the shadows do too, and Eames isn’t able to hide his wince, or how even behind his eyelids the low light of the bedroom feels suddenly far too bright.

For a moment, everything is still and quiet. Too quiet, Eames thinks. Suspiciously quiet.

He squints open his eyes to find Arthur looking down at him, the same considering look on his face.

“Roll over,” Arthur says.

“Pardon me?”

“Roll over. I'll give you a back rub.”

“Rolling over does somewhat defeat the purpose of all this,” Eames says, reaching out to snap the elastic of Arthur’s lovely knickers, reaching round to palm his lovely arse.

“Just do it.”

Eames raises an eyebrow.

“Please,” Arthur says, sounding anything but contrite.

“Since you asked so nicely.”

He flops over and buries his face in the nearest pillow. The world shifts around him as Arthur climbs off the bed. The lamp clicks, and Eames knows if he were to open his eyes, raise his head, the only illumination would be the puddle of light spilling through from the sitting room.

He doesn’t know whether to be touched or a touch appalled that Arthur knows him so well. Perhaps both in equal measure.

And then Arthur’s back and so are his clever hands, kneading away the wound-in tension from Eames’ back, his shoulders, then gentling up his neck, his hairline, soothing across his scalp.

Until—

“Turn over.”

“Roll over,” Eames murmurs, “turn over. Am I a man or a rotisserie chicken?”

“Just —” Arthur says, tugging at his shoulder.

So Eames turns, limply, a marionette on loosened strings, muscles bullied into relaxation.

Arthur settles, straddling his hips. “Feeling better?”

“Hm?” Eames breathes, distracted by the sight atop him. Christ, and what a sight it is.

“I said, feeling better?”

The hardening line of Arthur’s cock is making its presence known behind silk and lace.

“Much better,” Eames says, reaching out.

Arthur slaps his hand away. “Later. Let me finish.”

So Eames lets him — his shoulders worked over from the front this time, then down to his chest. Eames doesn’t imagine he carries much tension in his pectoral muscles, but if that’s Arthur’s idea of a personal indulgence, who is he to disagree?

He’s certainly not one to disagree with the massage he’s been manhandled into, but he is appalled to find his eyes growing heavier even as Arthur’s hands dip lower.

He’s so very tired, is the thing. Will be until his body clock deigns to let the rest of him catch up. Or fall behind. He can’t remember which.

But Arthur’s hands are on him, firm and sure and familiar. Arthur, cornerstone of it all these days.

Arthur…

He sleeps.

Doesn’t know for how long, but when he wakes Arthur’s warm against him, soft and unguarded, one stockinged leg flung over Eames’ thigh.

He senses Eames’ rousing though, rouses enough himself to make a grumpy, querying noise against Eames’ throat.

“Christ, I'm sorry,” Eames whispers, voice craggy with sleep. “It's the damn jet lag.”

“Shh,” Arthur says. He tilts Eames’ jaw for a few clumsy, half-awake kisses, then settles back in, breath warm in the crook of Eames’ neck. “Go to sleep, Mr Eames.”

 

#

 

Eames wakes in the morning to an empty bed and an email from Arthur’s employers — a note that transferred funds have been reimbursed as services weren’t required.

And Eames is having none of it.

He makes a phone call, talks to the usual utterly polite, always nameless voice, cancels the reimbursement and adds a substantial tip.

“Thank you, sir. I’ll be sure to forward the amount to the employee in question.”

"Please do."

It’s always sir, he’s noticed. Never Mr Eames.

When anything is spoken of in as many words, it’s personal assistant, private companion — all so cleverly couched in terms that mean no one will look too closely. And if it happens that they do, they won’t find anything worth finding.

There’s a contract with his lawyer, somewhere, he knows, any number of nondisclosure agreements. It’s all so terribly professional and discrete.

And the thing of it is, if it all came out, every tawdry detail, the worst the world would know is that he likes to fuck pretty young men in pretty lingerie, and no one who matters would care even slightly at all.


	2. Chapter 2

Eames prefers his New York hotels old and classic, and within spitting distance of the park.

The exposed-brick horror show he's currently patronising is none of those things. But no choice in the matter — he’s here to meet Conners, who’s in the city running security for some foreign royals on a shopping trip.

Eames is at the bar drinking a middling-to-good Islay malt when two disparate worlds collide into one and a familiar voice down the way says, “An old-fashioned, please.”

Eames startles, looks over — only to find Arthur, just as startled, staring back at him. 

“Am I — this isn’t — this is Tuesday.” 

What leaves Eames’ mouth is inane nonsense. This _is_ Tuesday, not Friday, and this is an entirely different hotel in an entirely different part of town. Arthur is plainly not here for Eames.

“I’m meeting another…” Arthur throws a glance towards the studiously disinterested bartender. “…client.”

Arthur’s wearing tight jeans, a tighter t-shirt and a straight rimmed baseball cap. The get-up doesn’t suit him at all, except for the obvious aesthetic value. It’s clearly a requested costume. Requested by Arthur’s client. Whom he is meeting. Here.

“In a hotel bar?” Eames manages at last.

Arthur glances to the door, then moves to take the barstool beside Eames. “He likes to pretend to pick me up,” Arthur explains, low. “Take me back to his room.”

“Oh…”

The thought of it — rankles. Badly. 

Eames takes a steadying breath. 

Who is he to even begin to… Well, it isn’t any more peculiar, is it, than dressing Arthur up in lingerie and having his way with him?

But the entire laundry list of proclivities doesn’t take away from the fact that it’s eleven o’clock on a Tuesday evening. “Don’t you have lectures in the morning?”

“I don’t stay the night.”

“You…” Eames can’t quite work out where that thought goes, let alone how the sentence ends. “Pardon?”

Arthur lifts a shoulder. “Once he’s done, I’m done. So.” 

“Once he’s done,” Eames repeats blankly, “you’re done.”

He can’t even begin to fathom the sort of mind that pays for the pleasure of having Arthur in his bed only to throw him out of it.

Arthur shrugs again, makes a vague gesture to the bar. “Why are you here anyway?”

“Meeting an old friend.”

“Here? Really?”

Eames lets himself smile at the incredulity in Arthur’s tone. “The choice of drinking establishment is very much needs must.” 

“Yeah, not really your type of place.” 

Arthur’s amused, Eames can tell. He’s never one for face-splitting grins or outright laughter, but his eyebrow is quirking, the corner of his mouth. He’s entertained. 

“And what is my type of place, darling?”

“Classic,” Arthur says. “Expensive. Somewhere that lets you break the dress code when you wear one of those hideous shirts.”

Eames’ sartorial tastes. A long running joke between them. So long running and convoluted now that Eames’ tailor takes great delight in sourcing the most outrageously hideous fabrics for him.

He’ll need to tell Marco to make the next batch the worst yet.

“You mean you don’t like my shirts?” Eames asks, leaning in.

“Or your suits.”

“Darling, you cut me to the quick.”

“You do have good taste in some things though,” Arthur allows.

“Undoubtably,” Eames says, hears his own voice getting rougher.

Arthur’s watching his mouth when he speaks. “I wasn’t talking about that.”

“No? Then perhaps you better enlighten me.”

Arthur’s going to — he’s going to tell Eames something filthy that’ll leave him ramped up all evening. Ramped up and randy as all hell until he’s subject to Arthur’s attentions again. 

Arthur’s going to, is the thing — until someone clears their throat.

An older gentleman, white-haired but still fresh enough in that nameless, faceless way, takes a seat a few stools down and gives Arthur a proprietary once-over.

And the teasing’s gone from Arthur’s face, replaced with a veneer of blank professionalism Eames hasn’t seen in years, not since that first time.

“I have to…” Arthur says quietly. “Sorry.”

Eames swallows down something sour. He lifts his drink and lifts himself. “I’ll leave you to it then.”

To a little table in the far corner he goes, where the tabletop is a mosaic of lacquered pennies.

“Christ,” he mutters, and doesn’t that seem to encapsulate the entire evening and the decor along the way.

He sips his drink quicker than he should, studiously avoids looking towards the bar, concerns himself solely with the awful tat that is the tabletop in front of him, and doesn’t notice Connors’ arrival until, “Sir!” Connors says, offering a sloppy salute, thumb gone wandering.

Eames gets his foot to the chair opposite and shoves it out from under the table, hard enough to thump Connors on the shins. “Sit your arse down and behave. I don’t see a beret on your head.”

“It’s me camouflage beret, sir,” Conners informs him cheerfully. “Right difficult to spot.”

Eames can’t help it. He glances over to the bar as Connors gets settled, finds Arthur watching them, watching him, but only for a heartbeat before his eyes flick back to his — companion. 

“Alright cocker?” Connors says, kicking Eames’ heel, looking for some attention of his own. He's grinning at Eames, wide, only missing two teeth now for a wonderful change. 

“Far the better for seeing you, my love.”

“Think I could get a Carlsberg in this hipster shithole?” Connors stands again, not waiting for an answer. “What you drinking, sir? Actually, no, fuck that. It’ll be the most expensive thing on the menu.”

“The Kilchoman, please,” Eames tells him. “Just a splash of water. No ice.”

Off Connors goes and —

There’s a hand on Arthur’s knee now. Eames is caught looking. Not by Arthur.

His companion is enjoying Eames’ attention though. Ridiculous old codger, smirking like he thinks he’s won Arthur away, like he didn’t pay for the privilege in the first —

No.

No. Nothing helpful lies down that path.

Connors ambles back, Eames’ whisky in one hand and a neon green hurricane glass in the other, pink umbrellas sprouting from it, a flamingo mounted on a straw.

“Didn’t have any Carlsberg,” is the only explanation forthcoming.

And short work’s been made of a fancied seduction in the interim. Arthur and his companion are leaving now. There’s a hand placed possessively on Arthur’s lower back, more on his arse than not.

Eames is blatant enough in his observation to pique Connors’ interest. He leans back in his chair craning for a look, entirely obviously, like a man who hasn’t spent any number of years training in the art of subterfuge and then as many after practicing it.

“Lost your chance there.”

“There never was one to begin with,” Eames says.

Connors plucks one of the umbrellas from his drink and reaches out to tuck it behind Eames’ ear. “No offence, but you look fucking knackered, sir.”

“I’ve been fresher,” Eames allows. “Little busy at work at the moment.”

Connors snorts. “Then tell the old man and his poncey son to get fucked, sir, and come work with me. It’ll be just like old days, except with decent equipment and private jets.”

Eames can’t help a snort of his own. “As much as I appreciate the offer, I’m afraid I have other obligations.”

“Obligations?” Connors says. “The fuck you do. You don't owe them a thing, sir. Eh? Listen, you don’t get owt for nowt, and you owe that poncey little fuck fuck all.”

“But I owe his father a great deal.”

It was Maurice Fischer who took a chance on him, after all, when he was fresh out on civvy street and still flinching whenever a door slammed. It was Maurice Fischer who held out a hand of opportunity when the oily slick of the City was calling, growing harder to resist.

Quite the thing it seemed then to haul in at the foundations of Maurice Fischer’s latest folly. He knew he’d have to watch Rome burn eventually, but there was something mildly cathartic about the thought of doing that from the inside out.

But in the end…

The original startup, the media likes to call them. The startup that started it all. 

A ridiculous soundbite but perhaps there’s an inherent truth in there, somewhere. They did what no one else had done. They were supposed to fail. Expected to fail. Doomed to fail.

They didn’t. They were all far too good, even if Maurice never was, and Eames is yet to find a suitable fiddle.

“I owe the father a great deal,” he says again, as much to himself as anyone. “And he's not dead yet.”


	3. Chapter 3

Eames takes a few days at Thanksgiving. He insists that his North American employees do, so he supposes he can force himself into the same.

Entirely unrelatedly, Ariadne glared at him in her inexplicably terrifying way when he mentioned he might work through.

So he takes a few days.

Wednesday evening. He’s easing his way through three fingers of Balvenie and catching up with some acquisitions reports when the thought first occurs.

And it’s a silly fancy, a pointless one. He knows it is.

There’ll be family. Friends. Undoubtably there will be.

But…

He makes the call anyway.

“I’m sorry, sir. Arthur has no availability for the Thanksgiving weekend.”

It’s no surprise. It is, in fact, entirely what he was expecting. Idly, Eames says, “Family commitments?”

“No, sir.” There’s a pause on the end of the line. “Arthur’s time has been engaged by another client.”

“I see,” Eames says. “Thank you.”

He puts the phone down, rolls out his stiff neck, and goes back to his reports and his whisky.

 

#

 

The Friday next, and the sense of déjà vu is acute.

He’s late off a flight from Nuuk of all places, so the jet lag’s not so latent, the headache not so bad. But the rest…

He’s sat on the armchair this time as Arthur makes his way over in black heels and black lingerie, hair slicked back, eyes dark.

“Have a pleasant Thanksgiving?” Eames asks. Hadn’t intended to. Couldn’t help himself, suddenly.

Arthur gives him an odd look, and Eames knows why. It’s too familiar, that question, and Eames has never been one for familiarity, not here in this room, not between them, not even when Arthur offers. 

And Christ, he stopped doing that years ago.

“It was okay,” Arthur says. “Pretty relaxing.”

“Spent most of it in bed, did you?”

Arthur’s eyes spark with a knowing gleam. He can read Eames like the most pedestrian of airport thrillers. “Some of it, yeah.”

The ember’s burning, an awful thing, possessive, jealous, fucking prehistoric, but it’s been burning since that awkward night at the bar, since that thwarted phone call. 

It doesn’t take much to stoke it, and Arthur’s practiced, amused indifference is more than enough.

“Come here,” Eames says. “Get on my lap.”

Arthur does. Slings a leg over and settles, forearms braced on Eames’ shoulders. 

Eames slides his hand up Arthur’s bare thigh. No stockings tonight. His skin is entirely smooth.

That’s not something Eames has ever asked for, not something he minds one way or the other. So it must’ve been the whim of another client. The sort of client, no doubt, who likes Arthur smooth, likes to fuck him from behind, never looking too closely. 

Well, more fool them — because Arthur looks lovely. Seldom looks anything but lovely. And tonight he’s exquisite. A pair of french knickers, a touch more coverage than usual. They could be silk boxers if it weren’t for the lace and the extravagant transparency. 

“I’m going to tie you up tonight,” Eames tells him. He hadn’t thought to do it, not until that very moment, but now it’s all he wants.

Arthur’s lips quirk. “Are you?”

“Tie you up. Have my way with you.”

“Yeah?” Arthur leans down to bite at his jaw. “Gonna spank me too?”

“You don’t sound particularly intimidated by the prospect,” Eames tells him darkly, annoyance simmering.

The quirk becomes a full-blown smirk. “Would you like me to sound intimidated?”

Eames is hideously wealthy, reasonably handsome, and arguably one of the most influential men in the world. Arthur, so often, so obviously, finds him patently ridiculous.

“Christ. Don’t I induce even a semblance of foreboding?” There’s a koan in there somewhere, about asking questions you already know the answer to.

Arthur’s not paying him much attention though, too busy working open the top button on his shirt, loosening Eames' tie. “I mean, if I don’t take them off you fall asleep with your socks on, so…” 

“Fucking Christ,” Eames says, because, yes, _fucking Christ_.

Arthur pushes back and stands up. “Come to bed.”

“No,” Eames says. “Shan’t.”

“Shan’t?”

“ _Shan’t_.”

“Is that a word people still use? Are you eighty?”

“Do I look eighty?”

“Honestly, you look like an overgrown toddler having a tantrum.”

Glowering, Eames gets himself to his feet.

“Come on.” Arthur tugs at his arm, ineffectually for it. “Bedroom.”

And that’s a touch of pantomime, even in their little bubble of pretence. Arthur could move him if he wanted. A little at least. Knock him off balance anyway. There’s some training there. He sees it in the way Arthur holds himself when he’s not consciously relaxing his posture.

Childhood martial arts, perhaps.

And something more recent. A self defence class or two. Krav maga if he were a guessing man.

A flicker of lights. There’s a thunderstorm kicking off outside. Touch late in the season for it but fitting.

“Eames,” Arthur says, a hint of impatience sneaking through. “Come on. Come tie me up, do some manly ravishing.”

“There’s no need to humour me,” Eames tells him.

“Who says I’m humouring you?” Though the little smirk on his face says it plain enough.

And if Eames does one thing tonight it will be to wipe that expression clean away.

He grabs Arthur by the waist, slings him up in a fireman’s carry, then to the bedroom where he throws him carelessly down onto the bed.

The headboard bangs, and Arthur bounces, arse over teakettle until he gets his knees under him.

“Get up,” Eames says. “Come here.”

When Arthur isn’t quick enough about it, too intent on making his approach visually appealing, Eames grabs his ankle and hauls him over.

“Stand up and stop mincing.”

Arthur’s taller than him with the heels on. Eames tilts his chin up. The smirk’s still there.

“Take off my tie. Give it to me.”

Arthur looks for a kiss as he unknots Eames’ tie. Eames doesn’t give him one. Damned if he will.

And Christ, he doesn’t like himself much tonight — too caught up with the simmering inclination to punish Arthur for something that isn't his fault at all.

So Arthur gets his kiss in the end, gentle as he can make it.

The tie slides free in a whisper of silk. Arthur presses his wrists together and holds them out. “Well?”

“No,” Eames says. “Behind your back.”

And that gets the little hitch he likes, the stutter in Arthur’s breathing. 

He pushes Arthur over, chest to the bed, kicks his legs wide, plants his hand on the small of Arthur’s back and presses down until Arthur exaggerates that lovely arch as far as it will go.

And then it’s as simple as his crumpled tie knotted around Arthur’s wrists, and Arthur’s pretty knickers torn open, exposing him to the cool of the room. 

Eames licks his thumb and presses it there. Lightly, with no pressure. He watches for the thrill of goosebumps rising, the little shiver Arthur tries to hide.

Then he gets to work — first his tongue, then the tip of his cock, and then the rest of him when Arthur’s bitten-off moans get to be too tempting.

There’s another round after that, where Arthur’s bonds become Eames’ blindfold. And they both enjoy themselves so much that Eames forgets why he was in such a contrary mood to begin with.

But later, naked, tangled together and sated, he sees the bruise on the back of Arthur’s neck. One he didn’t put there.

Eames doesn't — he never leaves bruises.

 

#

 

And it stays with him, curdles in his belly, raw and horrid.

Often, he wonders how it got there. A smudge of purple just under Arthur’s hairline. A thumbprint, he supposes, from someone who held Arthur down and fucked him. Kissed him, perhaps — or didn’t. Dressed him up. Stripped him bare. 

There are a myriad of possibilities. Eames considers them all.

And they stay with him, _it_ stays with him, the thought, the image. 

Until —

In another hotel room overlooking another park in another city altogether, Eames picks up the phone again.

“An exclusivity agreement, sir?”

“Yes,” Eames says. “What precisely would that entail?”

“The employee would need to approve it, sir, and you would pay a retainer towards the maintenance of the exclusivity.”

“Wonderful,” Eames says. “Let's do that, shall we? You have my details.”

There is a palpable sense of hesitancy from his nameless friend. “The price often proves prohibitive, sir…”

“And the price is?”

“Fives times that of an overnight visit to yourself, sir.”

Eames is fairly certain he made that and more before breakfast. “The price won’t be a problem.”

“Then may I ask who the employee in question is, sir?”

“Arthur,” Eames says.

The voice, always nameless, is a voice he hasn’t spoken to before. She hesitates again, noticeably, then says, “Who, sir?”

“Arthur.”

“I…one moment, please.” There’s a distant clack of keys and a faint crackle on the line. “Oh, yes. I see. Arthur. Thank you, sir. I’ll begin the process right now.”


	4. Chapter 4

When Arthur next knocks on his door, Eames is waiting to open it.

“Arthur,” he says, stepping back to let him in.

Arthur doesn’t say anything. He’s looking strict though. The tie’s in a double windsor this evening and that usually spells trouble. 

“Something the matter?” Eames asks. Though it can only be one thing, and Arthur’s expression doesn’t speak well of a pleasant outcome.

“An exclusivity agreement?”

“I’m the archetypal only child,” Eames says, trying for lightness. “I don’t share well with others.”

“No, I got that, what with the exclusivity agreement and all.”

Arthur’s face is devoid of any sort of reliable expression. Even at the best of times, Eames has a devil reading him. Right now he’s entirely opaque. 

“Well, did — ” Eames clears his throat. “Did you agree?”

Arthur doesn’t answer. Simply raises an eyebrow.

The floor sways under Eames’ feet, just a touch. It’s the wind, a winter storm wailing away outside, terribly fitting for the melodrama wailing away in Eames’ soul.

“Christ, don’t leave me in suspense.”

Arthur’s stony expression breaks with a snort. “Of course I agreed.”

And something breaks inside Eames too, something holding taut now in relief. “I’m — I’m glad to hear it.”

The smirk, at least, is familiar. “I’m glad you’re glad.”

“Every Friday then,” Eames says, “when I’m in Manhattan.”

“You could make it more often now, if you wanted.” Arthur catches Eames’ tie and tugs him into a curiously gentle kiss. “You should.”

Eames shakes his head, smooths a thumb over the cut of Arthur’s cheekbone. “I don’t need another addiction, darling.”

And then —

He doesn’t bother with the bag of frills waiting in the bathroom. Not tonight.

In the bedroom he strips himself first, then Arthur, methodically. Lays him down on the bed, blankets him with his body. Lets Arthur take his whole weight, just the way Arthur likes, sinks into the heat of him inch by slow inch, again and again, a wonderful, torturous agony for the both of them. 

“Jesus,” Arthur says. “Fuck, Eames. Fuck.”

“That’s it, my darling.”

He knows the friction of the sheets would get Arthur there eventually, but that won’t do, can’t do. So he lifts Arthur’s hips, just a little, just enough, gets a hand on him, and works Arthur over until he’s spent and limp under Eames, face pressed to the pillow, smirk long chased away.

#

At the turn of the year, Maurice’s health takes a distinct turn for the worst. He decides everyone else should suffer too.

So after the hellish round trip to Sydney for the fourth time in a fortnight, Eames is set for Belize, where his hitherto reliable local driver takes a wrong turn — or is paid to take a wrong turn — and Eames finds himself in the middle of a kidnapping attempt.

A fairly incompetent one as these things go. He’s only a little battered and bruised.

But after —

Eames is in New York, in his usual hotel, in his usual suite, and he’s very much enjoying the enhanced pain relief that’s been made available to him.

It’s made short work of the headache, not to mention the harsh sting of his head wound. The world feels a wonderful place, so very soft and quiet, though the walls have taken to juddering around him, the floor sometimes too.

It’s not, by the by, entirely unpleasant. 

A knock at the door. Loud.

It startles Eames from his dozing, and doesn’t stop, not until Eames staggers to his feet and shouts, “Yes, yes. Don’t knock it down before I get there.”

He opens the door after a few fumbled attempts — and Arthur’s on the other side. 

“Darling,” Eames says, surprised. “You’re distinctly early.” A day early, in fact.

“Eames.” Arthur shoulders his way inside, runs his hands up and down Eames’ chest, his sides, across his shoulders. “Eames. You’re okay.”

“Very much so,” Eames says, leering, then wobbling a touch for the bargain, “now that you’re here.”

“Jesus,” Arthur mutters. He gets an arm under Eames’ and walks him back to the couch. “Here, sit.”

“Sit, stay, good boy,” Eames mutters, snorting, as he tries to keep himself upright. Then Arthur sits down beside him, and it's far easier to slump on him instead. He rolls his head to grin up at Arthur, very pleased with himself, only to find Arthur looking the opposite, face pale, eyes wide.

“Darling?” he asks, a sudden cut of concern.

“I — uh, read about what happened.”

And that is the first hint, the only hint, Arthur’s ever given, in all the years, that he knows who Eames is outside the confines of this suite and the little games he’s paid to play.

Eames hauls himself more or less upright. “Many things happened, darling. _Specificity_ , Arthur. You’re usually so fond of it.”

“I read that you were — injured. You were injured.”

“Well, for relative values thereof.”

“Eames,” Arthur says, impatience clear. 

So, “Just this,” Eames tells him, gesturing to where Arthur’s hand is hovering over the stonker of a bruise at his hairline. “And this,” to the pristine gauze wrapped around his lower arm.

“What is _this_?” Arthur says, voice tight, as he lifts Eames’ arm for a closer look.

“Bullet graze. Very minor.”

“A sentence that contains the word bullet is never minor.”

“Technically, it was a sentence fragment.”

“Technically, I don’t give a fuck.”

“Oh, goodness,” Eames says, giddy with opiates and delight. “Aren’t you a feisty one this evening?”

“Eames,” Arthur says, and his face is so awfully, terribly serious with it. 

Eames attempts to school his expression into something resembling the same, and the walls wave at him for his valiant effort. “I’m fine,” he says. “I am. Please, trust me on that. I would know, wouldn’t I? I’ve had far, far worse, after all.”

And judging by Arthur’s face that is very much the wrong thing to say, so, “Why don’t you take me to bed, hmm?” Eames suggests. “Look after the poor invalid?”

He is not taken to bed, but to the bathroom, where he’s forced into a bubble bath, one Arthur doesn’t even join him in. Though he does wrap Eames’ arm in some clingfilm he’s procured from god knows where, and reappears at regular intervals to snap, “Don’t fall asleep.”

Eames may fall asleep, but just the once, and is hauled upright again with a sharp, “I fucking mean it, Eames.”

Later, he’s propelled to the bedroom past shirts neatly hanging and luggage packed away. Room service is waiting for him, drearily plain grilled chicken and steamed rice. Arthur watches him until every bite is eaten, then he’s allowed two more of his lovely pills and tucked up in bed more firmly than hospital corners.

Arthur lies down beside him, but on top of the coverlet. That doesn’t seem particularly promising, nor does the lack of interest from below — Eames’ spirit is very much willing but the flesh is weak.

So if Arthur’s angling after anything, then Eames better not get his hopes up. He reaches out to pat Arthur’s cheek, gets his ear more than not, clumsy with it. “There shan’t be any hanky-panky tonight, darling. I am very drunk and very old.”

“You’re high, not drunk, and you’re only forty.”

“Thirty-nine,” Eames amends, prickled.

Arthur’s lips quirk, as though that was just the response he was expecting. 

“Oh, very droll. It’s not kind to mock the afflicted, you know.” 

“Oh yeah, you’re real afflicted,” Arthur mutters, but he smooths Eames’ hair away from the worst of the bruising with a gentle hand.

Eames smiles up at him. “If this is the treatment I’m to receive, I’ll endeavour to get shot more often.”

“Try it,” Arthur says, “and I’ll shoot you myself.”

“Oh darling,” Eames says, smiling still, eyes growing heavier. “I didn’t know you cared.”

And that, there, in the last moments before the pills chase him into sleep, is what Eames remembers afterwards — Arthur looking down at him, such a strange expression on his face.


	5. Chapter 5

These days, it seems, as much as he’s ever done, Eames lives his weeks by the progression towards Friday.

And here Friday is again, and here is Eames, alone in his suite, left staring at the door like a lonely old dog.

His head’s healed nicely, is the thing. The arm too. He’s been in the United States for the month, along the Eastern Seaboard for most of it, his normal galavanting curtailed by the edicts of medical professionals. So he’s blessedly free of jet lag, the usual headache just a background burr. 

Which is a convoluted way to say he would quite like for Arthur to be here. And Arthur is not. 

Still.

Eames tops up his Balvenie and looks back to the files spread out on the coffee table in front of him. It’s all verisimilitude, of course. He stopped paying attention hours ago.

But — 

A knock at the door.

“Come in,” he calls, leans forward to rustle a file folder or two, pretends to look so terribly busy.

But Arthur doesn’t pay him any mind as he hurries in. “Sorry,” he says. “God. Sorry. Class ran late.”

“I…” Eames says.

Tonight, Arthur is dressed in a crisp white shirt and dark jeans. The strap of a leather satchel is slung across his chest, a pair of tortoiseshell glasses perch on his nose. His hair isn't gelled back in the usual style — or perhaps this is the usual style, a tousled tumble he keeps pushing back from his forehead.

His cheeks are flushed. He’s a touch short of breath.

“I…” Eames says.

“What?” Arthur asks, a line appearing between his eyes. “Oh, the suit, right? Sorry. I didn’t have time to go back to my apartment. But I can call a cab if — ”

“No,” Eames says. “No, it’s quite alright. Don’t trouble yourself at all.”

Arthur hooks a thumb towards the bathroom, looks as evidently confused by Eames as Eames is by himself. “I’m just gonna go get…?”

“Please. Do.”

Eames closes his files in the meantime, arranges them in a neat stack. Shuts the lid of his laptop. Laces his fingers together and contemplates his knuckles.

Contemplates Arthur in the bathroom, opening the bags waiting for him there, the scraps and straps of silk and satin, black as ink, so professional and put together and —

Eames startles to his feet. He’s at the bathroom door before he quite knows what he’s doing. It lies ajar, swings open when Eames knocks.

“Can I?” Eames asks, hand on the doorjamb.

“Of course. Come in.” Arthur’s in the process of stepping out of the shower. “Something wrong?” he asks, reaching for a towel to scrub his hair dry.

Eames finds his throat just as dry. “No, I …” 

And he says nothing else, stood stock-still in the doorway. It’s only when Arthur quirks an eyebrow and makes for the bags on the countertop that Eames’ faculties return.

“Leave them. It doesn't — leave them.”

“Eames?” Arthur says. “What’s—?”

But Eames cuts him off with a kiss, digs his hands into the sleek, tousled waves of Arthur’s hair, feels the sweep of it through his fingers.

“Arthur,” he says. “Arthur.”

“What’s wrong?” Arthur asks, his words a breath against Eames’ lips. “Something’s wrong. What is it?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” Eames whispers. “Nothing, my darling.”

“You’re lying,” Arthur tells him.

“I might be,” Eames agrees. “But I’ve lied about worse.”

They never make it out of the bathroom. They do, however, make it back to the shower. Where they slip and slide on the tiled floor, fumbling in their eagerness, in the sudden desperation that’s overtaken good sense.

And in the end Eames picks Arthur up, brackets him to the shower wall, one hand on the tiles, one tight on Arthur’s waist, and rocks up into the exquisite, hot clutch of him, does that until Arthur wants more, wants Eames on his back so he can ride him to an end. So he does, on the bed — a triumphant smirk on his face, flushed and out of breath, come striped across his stomach and dripping from his chin, and he is quite the most beautiful thing Eames has ever seen.

 

#

 

Seven days are a torture and a blessing, as the idea forms and takes hold in Eames’ mind. Seven days are a torture and a blessing, but they pass.

Arthur emerges from the bathroom. He hasn’t changed out of his suit. In his hands, a black boutique bag, the little pink sticker broken. 

“This isn't your usual kinda thing,” Arthur says. If he’s uncertain at all, it’s well hidden.

Eames doesn’t clear his throat, though he wants to. “Change is as good as a rest, they say.”

Arthur looks at him a long moment. “Yeah, I guess they do.”

Nothing more than that. He turns, hand to the bathroom door.

“Arthur?”

“Yeah?”

“Could you wash your hair, please,” Eames says. “Wash the gel out.”

Arthur nods. His tongue touches his bottom lip. “I can do that.”

The bathroom door clicks closed.

Eames sits down on the couch and waits. He closes his eyes, slows his breath to try and slow the pounding of his heart. It doesn’t work, in particular.

The bathroom door opens. Eames doesn’t open his eyes.

“You paid for it,” Arthur says eventually, quietly. “You gonna look?”

Eames takes a breath — and does.

The knickers are a cascade of soft pink ruffles, all silk and gauzy chiffon. The garter belt is the same pink, the stockings nude and seamed. The heels are black, of course. Never could resist that.

“You look lovely,” Eames says. There’s more to say. He doesn’t say it.

Arthur takes a breath of his own — it is, perhaps, a touch unsteady. “Thank you.”

He comes without being told, sits softly in Eames’ lap, shifts his hips a little as he settles, but it's unconsciously done.

They gaze at each other, not touching beside, and it feels — it feels —

Eames trails his hands up Arthur’s sides, a whisper of a touch that makes him shiver. He scratches his nails gently across Arthur’s scalp, through the softness of his hair. Then with both hands on Arthur’s cheeks he waits until Arthur leans down to kiss him.

Careful hands and careful kisses.

Arthur doesn’t hurry him, doesn’t press for anything more. They’re so oddly gentle with each other.

Until —

Eames grabs a thigh, hitches Arthur’s legs around his waist. He walks them to the bedroom, lets Arthur help him out of his clothes. And then he lays Arthur out, presses their foreheads together, their lips, presses into him, a slow, gentle rhythm. 

“Eames,” Arthur whispers. “Eames. Please.”

So he adjusts the angle until Arthur’s breathing dissolves into little hiccuping gasps. 

“Fuck. Fuck, Eames. Fuck.”

And that feels right, even if everything else is topsy-turvy.

 

#

 

There’s something about the black lingerie. 

It’s professional. A touch detached. It draws a clear and delineated line between the service Arthur and his employer offer, and anything else Eames might imagine he…

It establishes a modicum of distance, is what it does, a pretence of uniform. Formality. 

Anything else feels too — intimate, perhaps. It’s better to keep things as they are, the lingerie as black as the suits. Professional and businesslike.

It’s better and it’s sensible. 

But once a month…

Ruby red. Rich chocolate. Antique cream. Every shade of pink.

Once a month. Sometimes twice if he feels he's been especially well behaved and productive — hasn’t taken too many pills, hasn’t had that one last whisky.

But never more than twice. Like he told Arthur all those long weeks ago, he can’t afford another addiction.


	6. Chapter 6

“Mr Eames?”

Eames looks up. One of the executive assistants is standing in his office doorway. He really should know her name by now — but she’s an efficient, entirely faceless sort. Recognition slips by.

“Yes?”

“Mr Browning wants to see you, sir.”

“And where might I see Mr Browning?” Eames asks, more than fairly certain Peter is half a world away as they speak.

But — 

“Mr Browning is in his office, sir.”

“Is he?” Eames says. “Well, there’s a thing.”

He takes the excuse to amble along to Peter’s office. Doesn’t bother knocking.

Peter’s taking in the view when he gets there. It’s a grandiose one. No need for it. But this office used to be Maurice’s, so there’s explanation enough.

He joins Peter at the window, taking a sideways glance as he does. “You’re looking grim, old chap.”

That gets a laugh. “Don’t I always?” 

“Thought you were in Sydney.”

“I was,” Peter says. “Until Fischer the Elder requested your presence. He wants you there tomorrow. The jet's waiting at Newark."

Eames doesn’t ask why he’s been summoned. He knows. Wishes he didn’t. “Peter,” he says. “You have to know that this can’t go on for much —”

“When the time comes,” Peter says, holding up a quelling hand, “we encourage Robert to delegate. A couple promotions. Some new hires. We steady the boat, then we bring aboard a new crew. In the meantime…”

What Maurice wants, Maurice gets, goes unsaid but not unheard.

“How long?” Eames asks. “Truly.”

Peter shrugs, but it’s carefully judged. “The doctors, they say months, they say weeks. You know Maurice. If anybody could hold on out of pure spite, it’d be him.”

Months. Weeks. Christ. “And until then?”

“We keep swimming,” Peter says. “Hope to hell our heads stay above water.”

 

#

 

So it’s Sydney and back before his body has time to register he’s gone.

And it’s a promotion for Eames — or rather, yet another string to add to his executive bow. 

Maurice remains intent on pruning back the board, seeing enemies behind every office door, whittling down and further down still. If something doesn’t tip soon, Eames can’t imagine it’ll be long until the only ones left are Peter and himself, and old Maurice, banging his pots and pans...

So here’s Eames and his godforsaken promotion, the workload of two spread out in front of him and —

A knock at the suite door.

Eames throws it a bleary glance.

He didn’t call for room service. Or — no, did he? The sleeping pills always leave him muddled, and he’s had four in the past thirty-six hours.

He scrubs a hand across his face, propels himself doorwards. When he opens it, Arthur’s standing there.

“Christ,” Eames says. “I forgot.” And there’s no artifice this time. He did. “Oh, darling, I’m sorry. I completely forgot.”

Arthur doesn’t look put out. He does, though, look a little concerned. “You okay?” he asks, hand to Eames’ chest as he eases him back through the half open door.

He’s in his civvies, is Arthur. Usually is these days — he has Eames’ number now, is the thing. The suit only makes an appearance when he thinks Eames needs a seeing to, a telling off, a good old bossing about.

The rest of the time it’s the civvies. Christ, sometimes he even leaves his glasses on.

“Eames?”

“Sorry,” Eames says, startling out of visions of tortoiseshell. “You were saying?”

“I wasn’t.” Arthur considers him, head cocked. Then, “C’mon. Let’s go get some fresh air.” 

“I wouldn’t think the air outside is precisely what you could call fresh,” Eames says, and is summarily ignored.

They end up in the park, where they eat pretzels and drink freshly squeezed lemonade, and it’s quite the most preposterously, ridiculously American experience Eames can imagine. 

And he was right. The air isn’t fresh, too caught up in the engulfing mugginess of the city’s summer heat, but it’s just pleasant enough, still, in the shadows of early evening.

“Feeling better?” Arthur asks as they wander, avoiding joggers and dog walkers alike.

“Much,” Eames says. 

“Good,” Arthur says. “Then let’s go back to the hotel and you can get your money’s worth.”

And Eames doesn’t say — he thinks he already has.

 

#

 

“Your things are in the bathroom, as always.” Thank heaven for the boutique and their regular deliveries. 

“But you're not in the bathroom.”

Eames takes a cue and raises an eyebrow of his own. “I’m one of your things, then?”

No answer other than a flat mouth and a crooked finger. So Eames does as he always does, and does as he’s told.

Arthur’s leaning over the big bateau bath when he gets there. 

“What's all this?” Eames asks.

“It's a bathtub,” Arthur says.

Eames snorts, delighted, at the utter derision in Arthur’s tone. “I know I enjoyed the last one, but in my defence, I was higher than the ionosphere.”

“The last one?” Arthur says absently. He’s too busy fiddling with the preposterous tap to pay attention.

So, “Doesn’t matter,” Eames tells him, thoroughly enjoying the view of Arthur’s denim clad arse instead.

When the bath’s full of bubbles and steaming, Arthur strips the both of them with lamentably little lingering.

“Get in.”

Eames follows orders, and Arthur climbs in after, settles between Eames’ legs, his slim back pressed to Eames’ chest. Eames closes his eyes, savours the warmth and weight of the water, of Arthur above him and against him.

Arthur says, “You work too hard.”

“More than likely,” Eames agrees. “My employer is not a man fond of delegation.”

“So get a new employer.”

“And then how would I afford your wonderful company?”

Arthur doesn’t reply. Only, “Why?” he asks, after a moment has passed, a few too many questions tied up in one.

“Old debts, darling,” Eames says. “Favours owed.”

And that’s some kind of truth, at least.

The quiet and the steamy, drowsy heat soon draw Eames down into a doze, and he lingers there until — 

 “Eames?”

Eames blinks up into awareness, alone in the bath, finds Arthur already dressed in the latest concoction. A flutter of finest Chantilly lace, silk stockings held up by silk ribbons. 

“My darling?”

“Come to bed.”

 

#

 

Arthur straddles him, palms and kneads at the muscles of his shoulders, his arms, his chest, something almost worshipful in the doing of it. He rides Eames gently, does all the work, watches Eames come undone beneath him.

And Eames — Eames finds himself, suddenly, horrifyingly, a touch overwhelmed by the whole thing.

He squeezes his eyes shut, but it’s too little far too late. The tear trickles down his temple.

Arthur doesn’t say anything, just leans down, kisses it away.


	7. Chapter 7

Arthur’s usually gone by the morning, and long gone by the time Eames wakes up. 

But things aren’t as usual this morning. Arthur’s waiting in the sitting room, dressed in the clothes he arrived in, and he stands abruptly when Eames staggers in.

“Arthur?” Eames says, entirely discombobulated. He reaches for last night’s hastily abandoned towel and makes himself decent. “What —” 

“Next week,” Arthur says.

“Next week, darling?” Eames prompts as the silence stretches beyond comfort or good sense. “Are you otherwise engaged? Uni commitments?”

But that’s not it. Eames knows even as he asks. Can tell from the blank set of Arthur’s expression. From the way the floor suddenly feels unsteady.

“It’s…” Arthur says. “The internship I told you about?”

He did tell Eames, didn’t he? Months ago, in the vaguest possible terms, when he’d been five minutes late and harried. “You got it, did you?”

“Yeah.” Arthur makes an abortive gesture, still enough to draw attention to the phone clutched in his hand. “Found out this morning.” 

“Congratulations.”

“Yeah,” Arthur says again, voice odd. “It’s a full-time position, and it pays too, which is…”

He studies something technical, Eames knows — engineering, perhaps. Or architecture. Something in the realm of computing science. Technical, but that’s all Eames knows. He never asked. He had no right to that.

“…which is unusual, certainly,” he finishes for Arthur, finally, eventually.

Arthur nods. It’s a strangely staccato gesture on him. “So, uh, what I’m trying to say is…”

There is a tightness growing in Eames’ chest. “That you’re not much longer for the personal companion business?”

“Yeah,” Arthur says. “That’s…yeah.”

“Then next week is—”

“Our last week,” Arthur says. “My last week, I mean. It’s — the last week.”

“Well,” Eames says, carefully. “Best make the most of it then, shan’t we?”

 

#

 

Come Friday, and in a fit of pique, Eames cancels his lunchtime meetings.

Instead, he takes a walk in the steaming midday heat and washes up in a preposterously expensive jewellers on Fifth Avenue.

“And what might we show to sir today?”  

“Something…special,” Eames says.

The jeweller doesn’t look much stumped by Eames’ lack of instruction. Doesn’t look much of anything, the epitome of faceless professionalism. 

“I think,” he says, after a moment's contemplation, lifts a glimmer of jewels from a case, “I think here is just the thing.”

And he’s right. It is just the thing — a shimmer of the finest, palest pink diamonds, showers of them, a shining cascade to fall from collar to sternum.

But, “I…no,” Eames says. “I want something less…” He can imagine Arthur, spread out on his bed, heavy-eyed and flushed, naked but for diamonds. He can imagine it, and he wants it too much. “Something less…”

“Not a lady for froth and frills?” the jeweller asks, taking pity.

“Well, not a lady certainly.”

One of the floating assistants coughs, startled, but the allusion passes his employer by. “Sir?” he says, confusion clear.

Eames bites down a smile. “Nothing. Do show me what else you have… Black, if you would.”

A parade of black pearl and spinel passes before him, star sapphires, obsidian, rubies so deep a red they look like spilled blood. They’re all spectacular, and entirely wrong.

“No,” Eames says — again, for what feels like the hundredth time. “It’s not…”  

“Then something a little more simple?” the jeweller asks, infinite patience, reaching for yet another case.

It’s black diamonds this time, tiny things, strings of them, more than Eames can count, a sea of shining black sand.

“Completely natural, sir,” the jeweller says. “Not enhanced or burned in any way. Of startling clarity and rarity. Simple, I’m sure you’ll agree, but exquisite nonetheless.”

Eames does agree. “This—” he says, swallowing hard. “This one.”

“Yes, sir.”

The assistant is left to handle the tawdriness of payment. He hands Eames the requisite little booklet of pedigree and provenance and says, quietly, while he does, “The gentleman is very lucky, sir.”

“Well, certainly seems his luck’s on the turn.” 

Eames slides his wallet back into his breast pocket, signs one last form. He’s needed back at the office. Should have been back hours ago. But he…

He…

“And the first necklace too, please.”

The assistant is nothing more than an impression of dark eyes amid the glimmer. “Yes, sir,” he says, and reaches for the open case, diamonds spilling over his fingers.

 

#

 

In the end, of course, Eames is a terrible coward.

The pink diamonds — they say too much. Or, perhaps not quite enough. So they stay locked away in the suite’s safe.

The other necklace, he leaves in the bathroom for Arthur to find.

“Eames?”

Arthur’s dressed in black silk and and black lace, and the necklace is in his hand, grasped loosely.  

“Darling?”

“What’s this?”

“It’s yours,” Eames says, smiling slightly. “Is what it is.”

The expression on Arthur’s face is oddly reassuring — determinedly blank, verging on faceless. “And what, precisely, am I going to do with it?”

“Wear it and weep when you think of me?” Eames suggests.

Arthur gifts him a sudden, sour look in reply, a startling change of countenance. 

Eames puts a hand to the wall to steady himself. “Sell it, of course, you silly dunce. Sell it and don’t worry about the rent for a good few months.”

“I don’t want it,” Arthur says. “If you want me to wear it tonight, fine, I’ll wear it. But I don’t want it. I don’t want to keep it.”

“Then you don’t have to keep it,” Eames says. “But you’ll wear it?"

Arthur takes a funny breath, a little hitching on the exhale. “Yeah,” he says. “I’ll wear it.”

Eames nods, feels something crest and then subside.

Later, he loops the strands around Arthur’s neck, tips his head forward, touches gentle fingertips to where Arthur’s hair curls softly at his nape, does up the clasp and settles the lie of it.

And then he kisses gently along the tendon there, breathes soft against Arthur’s skin, down to where black diamonds twinkle in the low light.

“Might I take you to bed, darling?” he asks.

“Please,” Arthur whispers. 

 

#

 

In the grey light of early morning, Eames pretends to sleep.

He waits until he hears the door click closed before he opens his eyes.

The necklace lies puddled on the pillow next to him, a sheet of hotel notepaper lying atop it, a mobile phone number neatly printed there.

The diamonds go back in their case, and back into the safe. The notepaper goes with Eames to the bathroom, where he folds it in half and then in half again, and then drops it into the wastepaper basket.

He washes, shaves, dresses. He goes down for breakfast and a wander in the park. And when he comes back to his suite, housekeeping’s been and gone.

The wastepaper basket in the bathroom is empty, and that’s —

That’s just as well, is what it is. 

Eames is a rich man. He has more money to spend than he could ever possibly need. He could keep Arthur in diamonds and silk all his days and barely pilfer the coffers to do it. He could give Arthur everything money can buy.

But he has nothing to give Arthur that’s worth — that’s worth any — that —

Matters. That _matters_. 

He has nothing of that sort to give.

The wastepaper basket is empty, and that’s just as well, is what it is. 


	8. Chapter 8

Maurice dies in September. An awful, terrible relief.

Eames sees Peter next in Sydney. They’re at the wake, lit contrary by the bright water, harsh sunlight off the bay. 

Peter squints at Eames from behind the requisite wayfarers. He looks like he’s aged a year in but a fortnight. He says, “We got a helluva few months ahead of us, kid.”

“That we do, old chap,” Eames says. “That we do.”

And so they weather the battering storms of investor uncertainty. Robert is of no use nor help, tangled up in a knot of grief. But he never was of much use, so that is as it is, too.

And Eames…

The weeks become months become a year from one day to the next. The headaches linger despite the pills, he drinks more than he should, sleeps less. Nothing changes.

And in the in between, the agency sends him any number of bright young things.

They're all lovely. They don’t stick. They never do. 

And after a while he just stops trying.

 

#

 

When the ground settles and the shakes stop, Ariadne pins him down to go over potential acquisitions. 

“It's just one guy and a computer, so.”

“Find our how much he wants for the algorithm,” Eames says, “then get him down to half that. I’d prefer just the code, but if we have to keep him, so be it. We’ll find him a cupboard to work in or some such.”

Ariadne snorts, tapping out a note on her tablet. “You got it, boss.”

“And finally?”

“And finally,” Ariadne says, proffering the last file. “Cobb and Cobb. Small-scale architects' studio specialising in sustainable design. Interesting addition to the renewables portfolio.”

Eames glances over the workup. “You'll be looking after this, I take it?” And on Ariadne’s nod, “Good. Do let me know how you get on.”

Then to Paris, to Bern, to Rabat. Another six months in Sydney follow, holding Robert’s hand while he navigates his new position like an unsteady toddler.

And then New York again, the inescapable perihelion of his orbit.

The city seems especially like something out of a dream after so long away, every visage conjured from some half-forgotten cinema reel, a twinkling backdrop beyond the window of a film set.

It’s a beautiful thing. A glorious construct. 

 

#

 

He’s fetching himself down from the executive suite to the lobby when Ariadne corners him.

“Boss.”

Eames bends down to kiss her on the cheek. “Ariadne. Beautiful girl.”

“You got time to meet some people?” she asks.

There’s a faceless blur of forty, fifty folk milling about in one of the atriums, the result of her latest acquisitions run no doubt.

“I have ten minutes before my car gets here,” Eames tells her. “I’ll press all the flesh you require from now to then.”

And so he does — meets this one and that one, meets the programmer who did come along with his code, but seems perfectly happy with his new cupboard. 

Meets the promising architects' studio.

Only one of the Cobbs is present, though — a chap called Dom, prone to squinting. He does the introductions, to which Eames pays but half a mind.

Until— 

“And finally,” Dom says, turning, “though actually, our newest employee, out chief project manager in fact — Mr Eames, this is Arthur.”

Dark hair, tousled. Dark eyes gone wide. Tortoiseshell glasses. 

Eames takes it all in. Takes it in and forgets, for a moment, just quite how to breathe. 

Because Arthur — is Arthur. 

His Arthur.


	9. Chapter 9

 

Arthur is very pale, not blinking. All Eames can do for a moment is blink. 

Then —

“Boss,” Ariadne says. “I think your ride’s here.”

Eames tears his eyes away, a painful thing. Turns to find a driver from the car service waiting by the door. The same driver from the airport, all those long months ago. Still immaculate in his uniform. Still, apparently, a hero. 

He turns back — but it’s to Dom. Eyes fixed there.

“I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse me,” he says, already excusing himself. “Duty calls.”

To the airfield, to the jet, not a backward glance.

He takes one sleeping pill. Then another. Chases the lot down with three fingers of some godawful bourbon from the drinks cabinet, and awaits the blissful quiet of a drugged, drunken sleep.

It carries him to Oslo but no further — where Eames loses the half-hearted battle with his conscience and cracks open his laptop.

He's there in the employee register, is Arthur. 

And Arthur is…Arthur, sure enough.

No nom de plume. No nickname. Eames has known Arthur from the beginning, as himself and none other — a show of trust that Eames never deserved.

As to the rest —

Arthur’s a little younger than Eames had thought, a little farther from home, but not much else is a surprise. He is as startlingly, sparklingly intelligent as Eames knew him to be. He’s had any number of scholarships and grants, part time employ in the requisite coffee shops and bookshops, had as many hours as could be had — but not enough to carry him through the crunching, piling debt of money and time that American university education imparts. 

So then, at the turn of a year not so many years ago, when Arthur swaps his place of employment to a familiar, achingly discreetly named agency, it’s easy enough to understand why.

Eames looks at the dates. Looks at them again. Makes his aching lump of a brain conduct some basic arithmetic, and knows for certain what he always suspected before — that he must’ve been amongst the first of Arthur’s clients.

That perhaps he…that perhaps he was the first. 

And then it’s all a little easier to understand. Arthur telling Eames his real name was nothing more than an act of naivety. The mistake of a rank amateur.

But no matter — because it doesn’t. Matter. Not anymore. 

Eames will do not a thing to endanger the future that Arthur has worked so hard and so long for. He wouldn’t — couldn’t bear to — and he won’t. 

He’ll leave Arthur be. 

 

#

 

Arthur, of course, never tries to get in touch. Or if he does, Eames doesn’t know.

There’s no way to Eames without appointment or reference or direct number, and Eames…

Well.

Arthur never tries to get in touch.

The renewables division calls the manicured wilds of some San Franciscan suburb home, so the breadth of an entire continent seems safe enough distance anyway.

Or it does until—

“Write something up for me then,” Eames says. “I can pop out west for a few hours. Do the speech. Pop back.”

“Ah…” Ariadne says.

“Ah?”

“We’ve got everyone from Renewables attending, but, um, the conference organisers made it pretty clear they would appreciate your attendance for the weekend too. They clearly want the press coverage, so…”  

Eames fights a sigh and doesn’t entirely succeed. 

 

#

 

He arrives late on Friday evening to some eco resort in Northern California and does so by private jet and helicopter, almost entirely to be contrary. 

Come Saturday, he makes his speech. Ariadne wrote it. It’s perfectly judged, of course, and his audience is perfectly charmed. As well they should be.

Some interminable mingling follows — Eames makes the right noises, shakes the right hands — then to the restaurant, where a godforsaken help-yourself buffet awaits. Every foodstuff is limp and faintly green and covered with unidentifiable sprouting grains. Eames has seen better scran in mess halls. Christ, tasted better in mess tents, sprinkling of sand and all.

“Dear God,” he mutters, appalled.

“It’s vegan,” the chap behind him in the queue says.

It’s slop, is what it is. But at least it lines his stomach enough to pop another pill. He was rather clever last time and convinced a faceless junior doctor he was in need of something stronger. And perhaps he was, because these pills do take the edge off a little. He’ll have another soon. Might mix it with a whisky, just for the hell of it.

Will, in fact, mix it with a whisky.

 

#

 

The resort bar is empty still, when he slips away from the crush. Most folk are lingering out on the patio yet, and in the gardens, drinking in the cool evening air.

In fact, there’s only one kindred spirit in the bar, in a booth in the far corner, already well on his way to half cut. Other than, it’s just Eames and the bartender — whose shirtsleeves might be rolled up, but at least there’s a waistcoat and tie in evidence, antidote to the appallingly casual atmosphere that prevails everywhere else.

“What can I get you?” the bartender asks.

“Glenlivit,” Eames says, “splash of water, no ice. A double, please.” Then, as the barstool next to him is claimed, Eames takes a steadying breath, says, “And an old fashioned for my friend.”

They wait, the both of them, until the bartender is busy down the far end of the bar, chatting to a wandering waitress.

Eames says, quietly, “You could have asked me to call you something else, you know.”

“Something else?” The ice in Arthur’s drink chinks as he rolls the heavy-bottomed tumbler this way and that.

“Other than your name, I mean. Your real one.”

“I never wanted you to.”

And that’s no lie. Eames isn’t sure what it is, but it’s not a lie.

Someone squeals with laughter, the sound spilling in from outside. Eames winces. Can’t help it. It’s a knife through his skull, through the pressure that’s been growing since breakfast — the spotlights in the auditorium no help, the pills less so now, the whisky likely not, either.

He takes another sip — glances to the side, finds Arthur watching him warily.

“I could…”

“You could what?”

“Help with…” Arthur makes a vague, nerveless gesture, so very unlike himself. “A back rub always helped. You…you hold all your tension in your shoulders. Your neck.”

And that’s no lie either. Nor is the warmth the idea sparks — to tumble into bed with Arthur, laughter and light, bitten-off breaths and sharp teeth.

But—

No.

Eames makes no reply. Leaves it at that.

“I’m sorry,” Arthur says, suddenly.

“Why ever are you sorry?" Eames asks. "What have you to be sorry for?”

“I knew you wouldn’t call,” Arthur says, quickly, plainly. “I knew you wanted to make it a clean break. I knew that. But I didn’t…your face when you…I wouldn’t have turned up that day, for the meet-and-greet, if I’d known—”

“Arthur, what are you—”

“I knew you were rich,” Arthur says. “I mean, you had to be. Wealthy. And in business. Tech, maybe. But I didn’t know that you were—”

“You did know.”

Arthur’s brow crumples. “What?”

“Of course you knew, darling.”

The ground shakes then — just a little. The hanging wine glasses clink, Eames’ drunken friend in the corner mutters a curse, a few tipsy screams ring out from down by the pool. But one shudder and it passes.

A minor tremor in the land of fire and fault line. Nothing of note. Nothing all that unusual.

Eames blinks. He’s lost the tenuous trail of thought he was pursuing. “It doesn’t matter,” he says. “None of it matters, in particular.”

It’s Arthur’s turn to not reply, but it’s not for want of trying. Eames can see the struggle to give words to what needs said.

It won’t do. That won't do. So he finds the words instead. “I got on all right before you, darling. I'll find a way to muddle on after. So please, don't waste so much of your valuable time worrying about me.”

“I wouldn’t need to,” Arthur says, tightly, “if you’d just — take care of yourself. Or — let someone take care of you.”

No need to ask who that someone is. “You’re my employee, Arthur.”

“Yeah,” Arthur snorts. “Personal assistant, right? I report to you every day. Real conflict of interest.”

“You are awfully naive,” Eames says, carries on through Arthur’s second derisive snort, “to think there aren’t folk who are paid handsomely to take note of when my attention is directed to persons or places it has no good reason to be. Do you think they won’t go digging, should they catch a scent? Do you think they haven’t already?”

“Do you think I care?” Arthur says.

“But I do. I care.”

Eames is wealthy enough and powerful enough — anything thrown at him would never stick, or if it did, it would never stain. Not his reputation, professional or otherwise.

But Arthur’s…

No. The risk might be Arthur’s to take, but he needs Eames complicit. And Eames won’t be. Never will be. And that’s an end to it. Has to be.

It’s getting dark. The bartender leaves to light the candles on the tables, comes back again after a while. He’s stacking tumblers when Arthur finds his voice.

“Can I ask something?” he says, wind long gone out of him. “But you can…you can tell me no.”

“Ask…?”

Arthur glances to the bartender, but he’s busy buffing crystal to a meticulous shine, his disinterest practical, not professional.

“The…clothes,” Arthur says, all tact anyway. “That you liked me to wear. I always wondered.”

“Ah.” 

“I know it’s not just a…”

“Proclivity?” Eames offers, his voice far lighter than he feels. “It is, in a way.”

“But that’s not all it is.”

“No, not all.” He takes a sip of his drink, tastes peat on his lips, savours the burn. “In another life,” he says, finally, awfully carefully, “in another life entirely…I knew the worst, you see, that man can do to man. Knew it well. Lived it, often. Lived through it, when I had to.”

Arthur is quiet by his side. Eames doesn’t look at him. Watches the bartender instead, his practiced motions, the economy of movement.

“And so sometimes,” he carries on, “sometimes I find that I like to dress a beautiful boy up in pretty frills and forget all that’s wrong with the world. It’s really as simple as that. Proclivity or not.”

Now Eames looks at Arthur. Finds him utterly unreadable, so reassuringly like the Arthur of old. 

“Beautiful?”

“You’re exquisite,” Eames says. “And if you didn’t know that, you should.”

The artifice cracks and Arthur looks, a moment, a little like Eames has punched him — or kissed him. Or both. 

But—

“Arthur!” Someone calls for him. There’s a figure in silhouette by the bar’s open doors. It beckons Arthur over, insistent.

Might be a Cobb. Might be the President. Might be God himself. Eames doesn’t care.

“I’m sorry,” Arthur says. “I have to go.”

“Yes,” Eames says. “Yes, my darling. You do.”

 

#

 

He orders another double, drinks it in double time, quick enough that the bartender notices.

“You okay, bud?”

“Just a little tired,” Eames says. “Is all.”

“Looks more than ‘just’ tired,” the bartender says. “Is all.”

“Perhaps,” Eames allows. He lets himself smile a touch. It doesn’t feel so alien. 

A considering silence follows, the eternal wisdom of a barkeep at work. Then, “So maybe it’s time for a change, huh? Change of pace. Change of scenery.”

Eames looks up, squints against the downlighting and the mirrors and the thousand bottles gleaming. The bartender is a lovely thing — dark clever eyes, laughter lines, slick black hair curling slightly, unruly at his nape. He’s lovely. Utterly so.

And that…

Well — in another life, perhaps. But not in this one.

 


	10. Chapter 10

When next he’s in London, Eames gives in to the inevitable and trudges over to Harley Street, where he is poked and prodded, scanned and sampled, and then deposited in Jack’s consulting room.

He waits there, fully expecting to be informed of his inoperable brain tumour.

But—

“Stress,” Jack tells him.

“Stress,” Eames repeats.

“Stress. Over dependence on painkillers, sleeping pills, alcohol. Perpetual jet lag. Choose any of the above, lad, honestly. I could, and you’d still be a wreck.”

Eames blinks at him a moment, entirely discombobulated. “Has anyone ever told you that you have the most appalling bedside manner?”

Jack smiles down at his notes. “You need to take it easier. That’s all I’m saying.”

“I do have somewhat of a demanding job, Doctor.”

“Aye, and so do I, _Captain_. Don’t see me in here convinced I’ve got meself a brain tumour.”

Which is an entirely valid point. 

“I…”

Jack sees him floundering and takes pity. “You’re as rich as a king. You don’t need to work, lad. Not anymore.”

“I like working. I enjoy it.”

“Do you, eh?”

Eames doesn’t quite know how to answer that one. “Jack — ” he begins. 

But Jack won’t have it. “How long have I known you?”

“Christ, Jacky. Too long.” Known him at his very best and his utter worst — or what Eames had thought was his worst. “Far too long.”

“Then you want some advice?”

“I feel that may be a rhetorical question.”

“Stop the pills. Stop the booze. And for Christ sake, Eamesy lad, quit the fucking job.”

It cuts too close, too true. Eames tries for glib. “Aren’t you supposed to offer me some soft words and a fistful of pamphlets. Aren’t we at that point? Phased withdrawal and the sort.”

“Well, aye, ease up on them first if you like.”

“D’you, Jack,” Eames says. “Somehow I can’t fight the sensation that this is distinctly lacklustre medical advice.” 

Jack fixes him with a level look. “You’re not addicted to any of them. You just like the excuse.”

The air leaves him. He has to look away, out the window, out to the street beyond. It’s drizzling, grey as flint. The world is a blur — no sharp edges, only outlines.

“You don’t belong here, lad,” Jack says. “In this place, what you are now. It’s time to find where you do.”

 

#

 

But no time to even breathe, let alone think, before he’s summoned to Sydney.

Over the phone, Peter sounds as frantic as Peter ever sounds, and that’s enough. Eames hightails himself to Stansted and to the jet, landing half a world away before the day’s done. He’s fairly certain the pilot broke at least one law of motion to get him there so quickly, but he appears perfectly unruffled, hair neat, uniform pristine, when he shakes Eames’ hand upon departure. 

Eames goes to meet Peter at a restaurant by the harbour, finds him there, out on the terrace. He has a drink in front of him and his sunglasses on.

“Peter?” 

“Hey, kid. Take a seat.”

Eames takes the seat. He takes the proffered drink — but doesn’t drink. Waits instead. 

“It’s Robert,” Peter says eventually. “The news breaks within the hour. No one else knows.”

“What then?”

“He’s dissolving everything. Transferring power to some of the company boards. Selling the rest. Selling most of it.”

“Christ,” Eames says. Breathes it more than not. “To whom?”

“Saito.”

“Fucking Christ.”

“Yup,” Peter says.

They sit awhile, staring out at the water, a yacht passing, another, then another, a smudge of no real definition, white upon blazing blue.

“Well, I’m done,” Peter says. He reaches out to chink their glasses together, then drains his. “They’ll want to keep you, you know. The Japanese.”

The strangest sensation overtakes Eames then. It’s like blinking up from a nightmare he can’t remember, save the pounding in his chest and the scratch of a scream in his throat.

He feels curiously light — and above it all, relieved.

“Can’t always get what we want,” Eames says.

 

#

 

He spends three months in Sydney, seeing to what needs seeing to. Dismantling the empire he helped build. Watching its old emperor unfurl a little more with every toppled temple.

And then —

He flounders a while yet.

There’s a house waiting for him in Herefordshire, an entire life waiting, in fact — but there’s also one last thread he can’t quite sever.

So to New York, in his usual suite. In a familiar bed, alone.

He wakes often from a fractured sleep, a little lost without the numbing of the pills, a little numb from the pain in his head. But when he does sleep, dreams overtake him, just as fractured.

Arthur and the pink diamonds. 

Arthur’s hair soft through his fingers.

Arthur’s face gentled with sleep.

Arthur curled around him, silk and lace.

Arthur…

Eames stirs awake. 

There’s music coming from somewhere. A buzz of words, mournful but growing louder, clearer. 

_…è una catena ormai che scioglie il sangue dint'e…_

Eames rouses himself enough to squint against the pale dawn light. The phantom warmth of Arthur is still with him, a memory against his skin, half a dream and already fading.

But —

Arthur is standing at the foot of the bed, shirt sleeves rolled up, tie loose, eyes shadowed.

“Arthur?” Eames says, blinking, not comprehending even at all. “Darling?”

Arthur smiles. A quirk to the side of his mouth. He looks very tired. So awfully tired. He says, “Time to wake up, Mr Eames.”

And Eames —

Does.


	11. Chapter 11

“Oh, my friend,” Yusuf says. “Oh, Eames.”

Eames feels something pressed into his hand — hard, round. His totem.

His fingers barely cooperate. He can only send the chip tumbling over his middle finger before it clatters to the floor, but that’s enough. He knows the weight. He knows the balance.

He was dreaming. And now he isn’t.

Christ, how could he be — with a catheter up his cock and an intubation tube down his throat.

It’s that realisation that sets him gagging, brings a flurry of nurses and some such in a white coat who tells him to breathe, and Eames would very much like to ask how he’s supposed to do that with a fucking tube down his throat.

But he does breathe, and at least one tube disappears. And when things have calmed a little, when various and sundry medical equipment is bleeping steadily, when Yusuf is busy with his white-coated friend — Arthur’s there, at the side of the bed, tidying away a pasiv, the insides of both his forearms abominably bruised.

Eames glances away, has to for the moment it takes his heart to settle again. But he looks back. He always does.

Arthur feels Eames’ eyes on him. Unflattens his mouth just a little. “Hey,” he says, not looking up.

“Ariadne?” Eames manages, more a croak than a word.

“Far away. Safe.”

“Good.” Eames says. Then, “Who?”

But even he doesn’t quite know what he’s asking. Who knew he was working the job? Who bribed the chemist? Who set him up? 

“It’s been dealt with,” Arthur says in his even, awful way.

“Arthur —”

“It’s been dealt with.”

A white coat comes to scold Eames then, and mightily. It’s all ‘bleeding on the brain’ and ‘very lucky’ and ‘no longer term effects.’ And when, at last, he’s left alone, he puts a hand to his aching head and discovers his hair missing but for stubble and a lovely new ridge of scar tissue.

Someone’s opened a blind for him. It’s night, or very early morning. And he’s not entirely certain but he thinks he might be in São Paulo, which is strange, because he wasn’t in São Paulo when he hooked himself up to a pasiv however many days ago.

Wasn’t, as it happens, in Brazil.

And that Arthur’s doing, he has no doubt.

Inexplicably, Connors’ grinning face comes to mind. ‘Lost your chance there,’ he says, cackling, and whether it’s a memory or a memory of a dream, Eames doesn’t know. He closes his eyes against it either way. That gap-toothed yellow smile. 

Too close, too real still.

But yet, never real.

Connors is dead, of course. Jack too. Dead for long years. Dead in those godforsaken foothills, the beginning of the end of it all.

And Eames is no fool. He can read himself as well as any of his marks. 

Surviver’s guilt. Aching loneliness.

Escort, rent boy, kept boy. The illusion of intimacy without the actuality of it. His unconscious mind, it seems, needed Eames to dress Arthur up in white lace and pink diamonds, to make gentle, tender love to him to realise he’s in love with him.

It’s all terribly overwrought. He’s appalled with his subconscious for its entire mawkish predictability. Not content, apparently, with the occasional rough fuck in an anonymous hotel room. 

And that is what it should’ve been content with.

What _he_ should’ve been content with.

The door comes open suddenly. Eames opens his eyes but he doesn’t look away from the window. He already knows.

“You should be sleeping,” Arthur says.

“I imagine there’s many things I should be doing, darling.”

Eames hears himself only after he speaks. Keeps his face blank but for the familiar hint of a smirk. It’s hard work and hard won. 

Arthur takes the seat next to the bed again, looks out the window too. “You know most of your projections don’t have faces?” he says.

“The art of the forge," Eames says. "When you pay so much attention to one face, for one purpose, the rest tend to fade. When I’m not building for anyone else, I don’t bother with them.”

Out the corner of his eye, Eames sees Arthur nod. That's answer enough, apparently.

The metronomic bleeping. The faint gurgle of a flushed loo somewhere above. A murmur of disembodied voices passing out in the corridor. 

“Your projection of me was uncanny, though,” is what Arthur says, in the end, because of course he does.

“I went to boarding school.” Eames makes his attempt for glib. Succeeds. Almost. “Could’ve been much, much worse.”

“Eames.” Because it’s not the answer Arthur wants. It’s not the question he’s asking. 

But Eames can’t. Not yet. Not now.

So, “I was just off a job where our mark was a tad over-trusting of his favourite rent boy,” he says instead. “I’d escorts on the brain, apparently.”

A lie, is that, and Arthur will know it, but what is there now that Arthur doesn’t know?

“Eames,” he says.

And Eames sighs. “It’s the life I would’ve had, you see, if I turned right instead of left. Old friend of my grandfather. Hamish McCauley was his name. Had a crumbling shipping empire and a useless lump of a son called…Christ. Called Robert.”

“Yeah.”

“I take it the Fischer Morrow element was your doing?” Eames says, slightly numb with the thumping inevitability of it all.

Arthur nods. “You kept going back to the metaphor of a failing company. I knew I had to encourage you to let it run its course. But to do that, I had to introduce an element of control. Give the dream some stability.”

“Clever,” Eames says.

“Cobb's idea.”

Eames closes his eyes on that. Doesn’t want to think too closely about Dominic Cobb and what Dominic Cobb now knows of the inner workings of Eames’ mind.

“You didn’t notice me,” Arthur says, “not until near the end, just so long as I didn’t…”

“Interrupt the narrative?”

“Yeah,” Arthur says. Eames looks over at him. Makes himself do it. Arthur has his forearms braced on his thighs, his own eyes fixed on the floor. “If I did, if I made you notice me, tried to get through that way, you’d just collapse everything. It would take days of dream time to find you again. Weeks even. Longer than that before you’d start building again.” 

“Desert?” Eames asks, pointlessly. He can still taste sand, grains of glass in his mouth. 

“Mostly, yeah,” Arthur says. Then, “Ariadne was the only reliably recognisable projection.”

Outside of himself he says and doesn’t say. “Matter of proximity?” Eames suggests.

“You gotta think so,” Arthur says.

Ariadne. 

He only agreed to the job because it was her asking. Not even a job. A nothing of a thing. Conjuring the childhood home of some geriatric oligarch, playing some long dead, long-loved babushka. A day of work for a year of pay.

For a few open wounds. For a few new scars.

“That was you, wasn’t it, after the kidnap attempt?” 

He thinks — Arthur’s frantic arrival. His own clumsy pawing. Arthur’s face looking down at him, unsettled, unsure.

“You had a bad brain bleed,” Arthur says. “There was new swelling and they had to operate again. So I had to make sure you were still in there.” He reaches up to tap at his own forehead, quirks an eyebrow up at Eames as he looks to the floor again. “Only one way to know for certain.”

The breath Eames lets go is quiet but it isn’t steady. “One hell of a risk.”

“Yeah. You were pretty high. Making the walls shake like jello.” Arthur snorts, an ungainly sound, and scrubs a hand across his weary face. “One wrong move and you would’ve collapsed the build. Thrown us straight back to the beginning.”

Some wilful misunderstanding that, but if Arthur wants to, Eames will let him. In any case, he can read what Arthur doesn’t say — this Arthur, with no artifice for a casual shrug or an easy smirk.

It’s odd. He always thinks of Arthur as so carefully, studiously blank. But that blankness is nothing but Arthur’s own construct in a dreaming world. In this world, the real world, all Arthur thinks and feels is writ clear on his face. And he never once, not for one second, considered leaving Eames to the mercy of his own unconscious mind. 

So if not now, then never. 

Eames says, “Do you remember…it would’ve been June of the year after you started working with the Cobbs.”

Arthur looks up. “I remember,” he says, cautiously, carefully, suspiciously. “I don’t know why you remember, though.”

“That was when we met. For the first time.”

“It wasn’t.”

“It was,” Eames says. “It was.”

He remembers that Arthur a little like he remembers his rare, real dreams. Impressions, half glances, a sense of safety, of rest. Of Arthur as he was, not made hard and sharp and clean by everything that came after.

“I don’t remember,” Arthur says, and no. In Arthur’s memory, they don’t meet for years yet. Not until that little tumble-down bothy at the boggy bottom of a jagged, rained-on munro.

“You wouldn’t. Remember. I had a different name back then. A few different names, as it goes. A beard down to here,” Eames says, hand to his sternum, “and a tarmac burn across half my face. You, though? You were the most beautiful thing I’d seen in…Christ, what seemed like forever. Scowling away. Quietly, blazingly furious. You were so angry with Cobb One and Two, sullying the purity of your brilliant research with military money. With ragged old military men.”

“You…you were in the test group,” Arthur says, voice gone low with realisation. “Mal’s group. I always wondered why you knew how to forge before —”

“I dreamed of you,” Eames tells him, while his courage can stand it. “After.” Sweetly, gently — before dreams became nothing but work. Sour things. Bloody things. “I apologise. You were a totem before I quite knew what a totem was. I learned later, and better, but it seems my subconscious fell back into old habits. Survival mechanism, I suppose. I’m sorry for that.”

Arthur nods. Just once. “I…” He stands, straightens his waistcoat. “You don’t — you don’t have to apologise.” And his hand is on the door knob when he says, “I have to go. There’s some things I need to…I’ll be back, though. Monday. We’ll figure it out, okay? Get some sleep.”

“I’ll try my best,” Eames says, and doesn’t.

And when Monday comes, Eames, of course, is one ocean, two passports, and half a world away. Just as he should be.

Just as Arthur knew he would be.


	12. Chapter 12

Eames washes up in Iceland. He has a useful alias there, a reclusive Australian artist whose derivative nonsense sells for ridiculous sums to the Antipodeans and the Nordics both.

But Reykjavík, with all its new tourist money and tourist traffic, he finds just a touch too hot for him. So Eames sells his little flat there and heads north — in an exorbitantly expensive taxi, of course. Coils in his head and a cracked open skull: no more driving for him.

He buys an old farmhouse in the middle of a few acres of rocky land. The walls are thick and the ceilings reasonably high — plenty of studio space, at least, and that will do him well while he splashes some more paint onto canvas and calls it art.

There’s a town nearby, a few villages even closer. The farmhouse isn’t inaccessible by any means — nowhere is on this island, with its painfully efficient sufficiency — but when the truly dark days of winter come, the driveway’s long and the snow drifts are already deep. That will keep away all but the most determined. 

And the most determined, Eames will deal with himself.

 

#

 

When he’s as settled as he needs to be, Eames pops over to his new GP, concocts a holiday car crash and a tale of such terrible bad luck, and is upbraided roundly for flying so soon after a brain injury. He handily neglects to mention that the flying was undertaken in the navigator’s seat of a succession of ageing Twotters — dodging radar stations and customs posts alike — and he’s sent home again with an only slightly tarnished bill of health.

Sleep, unsurprisingly, proves elusive.

Sheer exhaustion takes him perhaps twice a week and he reposes like the dead until it all cycles around to the start again. There are dreams, then, too. Occasional, sporadic creatures. He sees Arthur in them — in every driver, every barman, every shop assistant and concierge, in every face that isn’t faceless. Watching. Waiting.

 

#

 

The northern lights on show above his ramshackle patio are a welcome distraction when the insomnia’s at its worst. He’s gazing up at them, making his way through the dregs of some truly awful instant coffee, when the notion comes to him that he might just give into another stereotype.

“I’m thinking of buying myself a hot tub.”

“Never met a cliche you didn’t like, huh?” Arthur says, emerging out of the darkness in front of him.

Thing is, Eames had been at his utter stealthiest upon departure from São Paulo. He’d burned through any number of aliases, set any number of false trails.

Anyone else would have taken months. Years, even. Arthur’s found him in a little over four weeks.

“Took you long enough,” he says, just to see the inevitable scowl.

“I went to Sorrento first,” Arthur admits, and grudgingly at that. “I was there for a while. I thought, maybe…”

And of course he did. Eames says, “Oddly, Arthur, there _are_ limits to my predictability.”

“Yeah.” A laugh. An odd thing. “I’m beginning to see that.”

“Arthur…” Arthur’s eyes are shining in the twisting starlight, his breath fogging in the freezing air. But Eames — he’s a foolhardy man, not a brave one. He can’t summon the courage. “You coming in then? I’ll pour you a cup of this ghastly stuff.”

 

#

 

To the kitchen, to the table and its mismatched chairs.

Arthur’s swallowed up in one of those ridiculous puffer jackets North Americans love so much, bobble hat pulled tight to his ears, rucksack high on his shoulders and buckled across his chest. It takes him a while to extricate himself. Eames has two steaming mugs waiting by the time he’s done.

“Awful, isn’t it?” he asks as Arthur takes a sip.

“It’s caffeine,” Arthur says, obstinately grimacing through another mouthful. The hat’s gone now, and his hair is a tousled riot. 

Eames looks down at his coffee, at the smooth laminate of the tabletop, at his own chapped hands. “I hadn’t been working,” he says, suddenly, and for no reason he can fathom. “Before, I mean.” He’d been taking the air in Naples, in fact, providing Marco with a few more Degas sketches to truly muddy the market — Marco, who is not a Saville Row tailor but the finest fine art fence this side of the Po. “Working in dreamshare, that is. Hadn’t for quite some time. Not since the Fischer job.”

“I know,” Arthur says.

“Only agreed because Ariadne asked.”

“I know.”

“Had been thinking about packing it in completely, if I’m being honest.” 

“I know that too.”

The scratch of irritation is no great surprise. Their usual needling. The barbed back-and-forth. It’s enough, at least, to make him look up. “Is there anything you don’t know, Arthur?”

Arthur quirks him a smile for the effort. “Not much.”

Not now.

“Why?” Eames asks then, and there’s still no bravery in it — just the need to pull away the plaster, to pick at the scab. “I was gone, Arthur. I was well away. Why are you here?”

A hand to his rucksack, then to the table in front of Eames. “This is for you.”

Eames puts his fingertips to the brushed-velvet case. He knows what’s inside. And Arthur knows that too. “Paid Marco a visit of your own, did you?”

“Marco owes me some favours,” Arthur says evenly. “This is one of them.”

“Quite the favour.” Eames opens the case, lets the diamonds string out between his fingers. They twinkle at him, a thousand facets of rosy pink. “Do you remember stealing this? That first time? In Vienna.”

“Hard to forget.” Arthur’s thumb traces the route of the scar that cuts across his bicep, hidden now by the sleeve of his jumper. “That was fun, huh?”

“It was something.” Those embryonic days, the start of it all, of them, of this. “Something, indeed.” Eames stalls there, past and present as one, caught and a little lost in the slip and slide of fractured light over his knuckles. “Hideously gauche, isn’t it?”

“I think it’s kinda pretty,” Arthur says, a strange note to his voice.

His eyes are very dark and very clear when Eames meets them again. “Do you? Think so?”

“Yeah.”

“I never would’ve guessed.”

“You never would’ve asked.”

Eames concedes the point with a tip of his head, one that makes his scalp twinge, the skin still knitting together, the odd, phantom numbness of a newly forming scar.

Arthur’s still watching him, that long, level look. “You done running?” he asks.

Eames settles the diamonds back into place. “It would appear so.”

 

#

 

“Iceland,” Arthur says, much later.

“What of it?” Eames asks, laid out on his bed. He reaches up to rest his hands where Arthur’s hips straddle his own. The diamonds twinkle at him from their station in the hollow of Arthur’s throat.

“Mid Atlantic. Little lax with their border controls outside of Keflavík.” 

“So I’m told.”

“Useful for layovers,” Arthur says, as close as he’ll ever get to asking.

“So I’m also told,” Eames says, as close to answering as he ever will be.

The corner of Arthur’s mouth hooks upwards a touch. He nods, just the once, and that’s that.

 

#

 

Eames wakes. It’s dark in his bedroom and it’s dark outside. 

Arthur’s awake too, his fingertips skimming absently across the growing stubble of Eames’ hair.

And there’s something, suddenly, that unsettles Eames. He doesn’t know what. He searches back in his memory, finds it a solid, unbroken line. But—

Arthur shifts. He stretches across Eames, reaching out for the bedside table, and then Eames’ totem is in his hand. Eames spins it across his fingers — over, under, once and then twice — and finds it as familiar and as certain as the man lying next to him.

He takes a breath on the calming of his heart. 

“Eames?” Arthur’s voice is quiet in the darkness, and his hands are warm. 

“Darling?” 

“Go back to sleep.”

And Eames — 

Does.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The end!


End file.
